Agile Facilitation Skills

Communication is a critical success factor in all Agile projects. You need it to promote shared understanding and alignment between people with very different goals, responsibilities and perspectives, such as managers, domain experts, end users, technical experts and development teams – in other words, all stakeholders.

It’s no coincidence that the first value of the Agile Manifesto is Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools and that one of its principles states that the most efficient and effective method of conveying information [...] is face-to-face conversation.

These interactions happen constantly during the lifetime of a project, starting with the inception phase and then continuing on with all the opportunities Agile provides to bring people into the same room, where they can learn and get feedback.

Release planning meetings, iteration planning meetings, retrospectives, reviews and backlog refining meetings are all valuable opportunities to learn about how much value the project is generating, to review decisions that were made in an earlier phase, to manage risk and to let people learn about themselves and the way they work, so that they can improve.

To reap the benefits of these learning opportunities, your meetings need to be efficient, energetic, focused and participative. They also need to produce concrete results that you can put into action. Finally, they must make the best use of time of all the people attending, which is one of the most valuable resources you have available.